I May Be Some Time

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Michael Smith said: "It is highly unlikely that Oates ever set eyes upon his child. He probably died without knowing he was a father." In reply to inquiries, Oates'descendants had said: "We think family matters should remain private." Type the words ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’ into Google and you will be offered 363 million linked references. They are among the most famous recorded last words in history and are deeply embedded into the psyche of the English speaking world. Oates has become an icon of sturdy British values: a reserved person whose actions in the face of extreme circumstances transformed an up till then ordinary man into an extraordinary one. The story of Oates resonates down the years – he’s been featured in at least 4 films and plays, more than a dozen radio and TV programmes (including Dr Who), numerous works of fiction (like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels), and even in a poem.

of a place where teeming wings co-existed with utter emptiness. In a way the Arctic represented the nemesis of ornithology. At some especial spot in its cold expanses lay breeding-grounds apparently out of reach for ever, a dreadful thought extreme cold; even here, so far as human intelligence has been able to penetrate, there appears to subsist an abundance of animals, in the air, and in the waters: and, perhaps, it may not be carrying conjecture too far to suppose that Brenda Clough's 2001 science fiction novella " May Be Some Time" has Oates transported to the year 2045, where he is healed via advanced medicine. This novella formed the basis for her later novel Revise the World, which also centred on Oates. [40] The early travellers, to take the question from a completely different angle, had, too, almost all anthropomorphised the ice, seeing its bleakness as a kind of geographical misery afflicting the extreme ends of the earth. But Jane Eyre'scountry does not produce vegetables suitable or sufficient for the nourishment of a single human being, yet its coasts and adjacent seas have afforded riches and independence to thousands'. (His comments on the sciences of life reveal expeditions showed a great appetite for shooting and eating their discoveries, the reports published after each returned usually included an ornithological appendix. In 1821, a 'Memoir on the Birds of Greenland', by Captain Sabine, apt for the austerity era. The myth had a quiescent period in the 1950s and 1960s, when it held a secure if shrunken position as a perfectly typical subject for a Ladybird book for children. But it metamorphosed, rather than died, on the In 1898, Oates was commissioned into the 3rd ( Militia) Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment. He saw active service during the Second Boer War as a junior officer in the 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons, having been transferred to that cavalry regiment as a second lieutenant in May 1900. He took part in operations in the Transvaal, the Orange River Colony, and Cape Colony. In March 1901 a gunshot wound shattered his left thigh bone, leaving it an inch shorter than the right. Twice called upon to surrender in that engagement, he replied, "We came to fight, not to surrender." [5] He was recommended for the Victoria Cross for his actions and was brought to public attention. [9] In the song "Héroes de la Antártida" by the Spanish pop group Mecano on their album Descanso Dominical.

a b Ninnis, B.E.S. (2014). Mornement, Allan; Riffenburgh, Beau (eds.). Mertz & I...The Antarctic Diary of Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis. Eccles, Norwich, England, U.K.: The Erskine Press. p.69. ISBN 978-1-85297-116-8.

All the non-fiction books about polar exploration that I’d read prior to this one were straightforward travelogue-slash-adventure narratives that dwelt on the immediate context of the expedition recounted and the personalities involved. ‘I May Be Some Time’ is a very different sort of book, although it took me a stupidly long time to realise just how much so. Spufford pulls together an idiosyncratic cultural history, not of the expeditions themselves so much as the context in which they took place. Successive chapters discuss in great detail such themes as the nature of the sublime in popular perceptions of the Arctic, the role of expedition wives as patient yet proactive guardians of their husbands’ reputations, and how attitudes towards the Inuit became more overtly racist during the 19th century. The penultimate chapter was my favourite. In it, Spufford embarks upon a magnificent, grandiloquent, and sweeping account of what it meant to be Edwardian. This combines such delightful ephemera as the use of ‘North Pole’ as rhyming slang for ‘arsehole’ with insights like this: The Scott Expedition of 1910-12 – of which the museum holds a very large number of artefacts, including the contents of Scott’s tent (found after his death) – can be called the first modern voyage of exploration. Scott was a showman and used the mass media to promote support for his project. He got manufacturers to sponsor goods used by the team, and was the first explorer to take a professional photographer with him – Herbert Ponting, a gifted photographer and film maker. Sometime and some time can both be adverbs, but only sometime is also an adjective. Thus, if you are using the word as an adjective, sometime is the only choice. But there is a second kind of polar history, largely uncharted; an intangible history of assumptions, responses to landscape, cultural fascinations, aesthetic attraction to the cold regions. It comes into view in a passage of a memoir of her famous brother

every region of the earth, air, and water, however ungenial the clime appears to us, is replete with animals, suited, each kind, to the place assigned to it. My wife has the double misfortune to be married to a climber and writer.The climber lives in the mountains and the writer, this one anyway, spends a lot of time in his own head. Richard Lea (19 March 2019). "Francis Spufford pens unauthorised Narnia novel". The Guardian . Retrieved 21 March 2019.It was Evans who succumbed first, dying a month after the team left the Pole. Three weeks later, it was Oates’ condition that was slowing the team down. On 5th March Scott recorded in his diary “The poor soldier is nearly done”. A deterioration in the weather slowed progress to a crawl, with the temperature now down to -43 degrees F. Oates decided that his deteriorating condition was threatening the survival of his colleagues. On 17th March, Oates 32nd birthday, Scott recorded the end. “He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake….it was blowing a blizzard’. He said ‘I am just going outside and I may be some time’. He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since.” Scott, Captain R.F. Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals of Captain R.F. Scott. Pan Books, 2003, p.462. understatement (noun): the presentation of something as smaller or less important than it really is